


The Sound of Shaking Paper

by ballantine, FeoplePeel



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - College/University, Anxiety, Disillusionment, Dueling Banjos - Freeform, M/M, Modern Era, Protests, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 13:53:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18966571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeoplePeel/pseuds/FeoplePeel
Summary: Silver learns the value of a proper work-life balance, emergency contacts, and reading the newspaper.





	The Sound of Shaking Paper

**Author's Note:**

> So, a little explanation...  
> This all started with a [kink meme prompt](https://blacksailskinkmeme.tumblr.com/post/184441766472/college-au-flint-is-the-professor-everyones). And then some [reckless tags](https://ultraballantine.tumblr.com/post/184457693328/college-au-flint-is-the-professor-everyones#notes) were written, prompting a chat, which turned into this! 
> 
> This being a fun little experiment; two fics blended together, set in the late 60s and the modern era, separated by time but joined by theme, character beats, and John Silver's endless surprise at finding connection in others. This fic is a dialogue!

_**A Side**_  
August, 1965 

Introductions are notoriously finicky things. An entire thesis on the self presented in the moment of a handshake and the shape of a microexpression. They are, at the very least, important enough to get _right_. Max had once described it to Silver as akin to finding oneself as the other person wishes to see you and becoming that person if only for the span it takes to be sized up. In this regard, Silver has always excelled at introductions. Why he is so nervous then, on the eve of meeting the yet unknown _Professor Flint,_ he cannot say. 

Silver fidgets in front of the mirror. His rented suit is wool and too hot. He messes with the tie and finds it more crooked than when he began.

“Stop.” Madi bats at his hands. “It looks fine.” 

It doesn't, but Silver waits until she's busy with her own outfit to try again. “I still don't understand what he wants me to do.” 

“Grade papers, mostly. Learn to teach by example.” 

“I don't want to teach.” 

“You don't know _what_ you want to do. But you want to stay in school longer?” She looks over her shoulder to catch his eyes in the mirror. “This is the way to do it.” 

He unknots the tie and removes it completely. The color is terrible on him, he reasons. A ghastly yellow and black, like a hornet. 

“You'll like him,” Madi continues. Silver throws the tie on her bed and stares at her. “Well _I_ like him so you have to at least give the job a day before considering it a loss.”

“He didn't even show up for my interview.” 

“You're an aide,” she says as though this is meant to excuse the absence. He continues to stare. “He said my recommendation and your resume gave him _the measure_ of you.” 

“Whatever that means. Be honest he didn't read my resume at all.”

Her answer is a scoff. She goes digging through her dressers to further avoid him. She didn't need to answer. His resume is awful; intentionally so for the past year and a half so that no one in their right mind will hire him until _he_ feels ready. 

He is going into this with the knowledge that Professor Flint is a man not in his right mind. 

“Why me?” he tries with little success to keep the whine from his voice. “Why not Eleanor?”

“She doesn't need the humanities credits.” 

“Neither do I,” he points out with a smile.

Madi closes her drawers, turning around with a powder blue tie threaded between her fingers. “And unlike you, she plans to graduate at some point.”

He takes the tie and drags it around his neck like a noose. “I'll give it three weeks.”

* * *

Silver’s been listening to stories about Flint for four years, like a child’s imaginary friend. And, similarly, he’d thought (hoped) they’d never have the opportunity to meet. Looking at him now, Silver would have painted him as an older man, a bit doddering with a twinkle in his eye. He can’t say he’d put much effort into the imagining.

What Professor Flint is, in actuality--red-haired, dressed in all black, and old enough to be taken seriously--is a more striking image, more intimidating somehow than the bearded department deans and smiling hippie faculty with their tight curls. In the doorway to his office, Silver braces for the man to ask any number of questions. Where were you before this? How did you come to know Madi? What are your feelings on the conflict in Vietnam? Flint stays bowed over whatever it is he's writing and asks none.

“I'm John,” he steps forward, hand extended. “Silver. Just call me Silver. Too many Johns. I'm here to assist you.” 

“I know.” Flint takes his hand and stares through him. “You can take the desk in the corner. It's usually where I grade papers.”

The table in question is covered with books and bits of aluminium foil. Silver had seen an art exhibit much like it ( _American’s Landfills_ ). He thinks the desk may be more unintentional wreckage than any attempt at making a statement. Silver examines the spines of the books, waiting for Flint to speak again. He’s halfway down the stack when the other man coughs. Silver holds himself straighter.

“Can I _do_ something?” he asks, adding more genially, “I am, after all, here to help.”   

Flint sets his pen aside with an indrawn breath through his nose that has to be deliberate. “I told Gates I don't generate enough work to be the professor for this...experiment.”

Silver wonders if Flint knows how similarly his thoughts run. He opens his mouth to offer some commersiation, but can think of none that won’t come out insulting. Flint saves him the embarrassment. 

“Why don't you go get lunch? I’ll…dig up something for you to do in the meantime.” He looks around the room. “Probably.”

Silver flicks a quick glance to his watch. It’s only ten in the morning, and he says so out loud.

Flint shoots him an irritated look of his own. “The cafeteria opens at nine.”

“Dig it, lunch.” Silver backs out of the room, heel to toe. “Understood.”

* * *

“He's off putting,” Silver tells Max over coffee. He doesn’t care what Flint’s opinions on daytime meals are, it’s too early to eat anything more than a light pastry.

“Explain.” Max leans back on her elbow, displaying all the false openness of her single semester of psychology. She _is_ good--good enough to weave a thought by--but he prefers the attractive smile a day after studying excavation methods and dating techniques to the shrewd calculating look she wears now.

“I don't think I can, you just have to meet the guy. His room is messy but he's not. Not at all.”

“You spent five minutes with him. Maybe he’s a slob.”

“No, he likes structure. Certainly didn't like me there,” he sighs. “And Madi likes him.”

“Madi's generally a good judge of character.” Max rakes an unimpressed gaze over him. “Current company excluded.” She leans forward, more interested now. “He was a soldier right?”

“Navy, Madi said.” 

“Even better. Used to small quarters. What did _his_ desk look like?” 

Silver is mortified to realize he doesn't remember. He has an excellent memory for details but he'd been so distracted by the mess he can hardly remember what Flint had been wearing let alone what was on his desk. He says as much to Max.

“It's a terribly clever way to keep students out and the faculties eyes away from whatever he's doing.” She looks mildly impressed. “With the added benefit that anyone going into his office looking for something might have a hard time finding it.”

Silver smiles around the lip of his cup. “Let's change that.”

* * *

Silver spends a good portion of the afternoon clearing off the desk. The exercise teaches him at least three things about Flint. Judging by the dust on the tomes, he's terrible about returning library books. Judging by the divots in the arms of his chair from clenching and the darts dug so deep in the dartboard Silver can’t hope to pull them out, he has occasional bouts of anger. 

Judging by the open hostility, he _really_ wishes Silver were elsewhere. 

It may be that he doesn't like _people_ , but he seems to find Silver particularly annoying. Silver can do annoying, only he’s sure he _hasn't_ this time. He’s gone out of his way to be quite friendly! 

Silver’s attention is drawn to the door at the sound of a knock. Hal Gates enters without invitation, making a beeline for Flint’s desk.

“Flint,” he taps the shelf nearest to his head. “You've _tidied_.”

Flint manages to look around Gates at the now clear desk, obviously disgruntled. “My new aide.”

“Silver!” Gates slaps his shoulder hard enough that Silver struggles to remain standing. “Settling in?”

“Got my own desk and everything, sir.” 

Silver adds the sir with a bit of forced pep. Gates is a military man; a fatherly sort, always looking after ‘his boys’. Silver has none of the qualifications to be one of those, considered both too intellectual and indolent at once. What Silver has is a simple trick that worked to put him in the man's good graces early: a kinship with his son.

“How's Billy?” 

Silver hasn’t been back to the apartment he shares with Billy since Friday but knowing the man’s son as he does, he answers as best he can. “Fine. Working, always working.” 

“That’s my boy.” Gates bobs his head, turning back towards Flint. “Speaking of, will this...teach-in of yours be a students only affair?” 

Everything about Flint’s expression is sharp when he addresses Gates’ question. From his eyes to his smile, it’s the closest Silver’s seen to an emotion that isn't frustration. “You interested?”

“Open to the public means Billy and his friends might want to make an appearance,” Gates says. “But more importantly the Chancellor wants to make sure this isn’t going to put us in any papers.” 

“Tell Billy he can come.” Flint had looked down the minute Gates said the word _Chancellor_ and he’s not looking up when he responds. “Don’t talk to me about Rogers. After Berkeley he should feel lucky that I'm not taking him to task over some of this university’s bylaws.” 

“You’re asking for trouble.” Gates leans against his desk. “But I don’t have to tell you that. Just make sure you fill out the paperwork so he can’t drag you down for it later. Good to see you again, Johnny-boy!” 

Silver waits til the room is quiet once more to say, “Teach-in?” 

“An open forum, or sort of lecture.” Flint stands to pull his coat from the back of his chair and wrap it around his shoulders. “On the conflict in Vietnam in this case.”

Silver hadn’t asked the question out of ignorance, though he is happy to allow Flint to assume as much. He’d gone steady with Madi for two semesters, and been fond friends with her since. She had tried dragging him to a few of her protests, and had him listen to the teach-ins in Michigan and California. Radical students playing at logic and reason, shouting down anyone who felt differently.

Flint must have taken his silence as judgement because he continues speaking. “Is that going to be a problem?” 

“I'd be just as much a foreigner in the East as I am here, so I say it's none of my business all around.” Silver reaches for his own jacket. “Is _that_ going to be a problem?”

He’s managed to tug both arms into his sleeves and pulls his buttons through their loops. Flint hasn’t said anything, staring at him with something like pity resting between his brows.

Silver focuses on his gloves. “Gates said you needed papers?”

Flint brushes past him, whatever expression there before, gone now. “Talk to the Chancellor's assistant tomorrow. She’ll tell you what to do.”

* * *

“Well?” Madi pulls Silver down by the elbow, dragging him into the booth with her. 

“He’s far out,” he says in the best California accent he can muster. “I can’t imagine what took you so long to introduce us to one another.” 

“I _have_ tried to.” She loosens her grip on his elbow to flag down a waiter for a drink. “Four years ago, when we first started dating. My twentieth birthday party. He’s been at _every_ protest I’ve gone to.”

“So you weren’t trying particularly hard then.” 

“In my defense,” she laughs, pausing to thank the woman who had come back with a sidecar for her and a Hi-Rick for Silver, “you’re two people I _never_ wanted to meet.” 

“I’m a pleasure,” he defends himself more out of habit than truth. “But you know that. What do you like about him?” 

“I met Flint when I was fifteen years old.” When she half-turns to face him, he sees the hard glint in her eyes that means she has something to say and he’d better be listening. “The people my father surrounded himself with, people like Flint, showed me exactly what I wanted to do with my life. The type of person I wanted to be.”

Madi's family had been sent from Eritea before a war he knew even less about than Vietnam; African diplomats raising their daughter in Italy as an alternative to combats and coup d’etats. He feels confident enough to say, “And they’re not people like me.”

“They’re not people who run away,” she tilts her head. “Or stagnate.”

“I’ll consider your advice, as always. Though I should point out that activism is not a lucrative profession.”

“You tell me that like I haven’t been living in D.C. for four years.” She threw the rest of her drink back in a gulp, hissing violently and shaking her head. Silver stared at his own half-finished beer.

“In a rush? Billy's going to be here in a few minutes.”

“I have to go. I just needed this to steady my nerves.” 

“That doesn’t sound like you. A date? No, that’s not it…,” he narrows his gaze at her. “A job?” 

“Don’t say anything. I feel lucky.” 

“If I was going to curse you, it would have stuck by now.” He points out, leaning back and allowing her to shimmy over his lap. 

Madi leans over to peck him soundly on the brow. “Come over Wednesday night.”

Silver's intuition proves a little off, with Madi and Billy running into one another along the pathway to Silver's table. He motions Billy over, amused at the broad man pleasantly weaving around much smaller figures, exuberant or drunk or both at once. 

“She doesn’t like me,” Billy says as he makes himself comfortable across from Silver. As comfortable as possible, anyway. 

“Madi?” Silver stops his drink halfway to his lips. “Half the time I’m not sure why she likes _me_.” 

He knows why. Underneath all his carefully cultivated apathy and common sense, Silver still cares about decency and respect – the big things that are too often regarded as optional. And when it comes to people he cares about? He'll do almost anything. At some point, he accidentally let Madi know that about him, and the rest, as they say, was history.

“ _You_ make her smile.” Billy reaches over the back of his booth to pluck up a bottle from the table behind them.

“If you think every girl who doesn’t smile at you doesn’t like you, you’re going to have a terrible time with women, my friend.”

“I’m not worried about my luck with women,” Billy mutters around the lip of his (stolen) drink. “I would like to know my friend’s girlfriend can stand to be in the same room as me.”

Silver thinks that, given the years Madi spent keeping Silver and Flint from meeting, had this been her true aim she would have achieved it. “Don’t take it personally, Billy. Likely you’ve called her my girlfriend one time too many and she finds it exhausting to keep correcting you.” 

“Sorry,” he says and looks genuinely so. Billy’s idea of romance borders on traditional. Of the many movements he’s thrown his weight behind, _free love_ is one he’s stalwartly avoided. 

“You ever meet a professor by the name of Flint?” Silver changes the subject and Billy’s face relaxes. “First name James if I recall correctly,” he adds the last to sound humble. He _always_ recalls correctly. 

Billy takes the length of one sip to contemplate his question. “One of Dad's war buddies. English, right? I think Dad helped him get the job. He was using the floor above ours as an apartment after mom passed for a few months.” Billy falls into the recollection. That would explain Gates’ cordial, near fraternal way with Flint, Silver thinks. “I’d hardly remember him for how little I saw him but the man is…,” 

“Memorable.” 

“That’s one word for it.” 

“What are you helping him with?” 

“A lot of nothing right now.” Silver eventually acquiesces under Billy’s coaxing smile. “He’s hosting a teach-in sometime next week. Your father was _going_ to tell you about it but there you are, I’ve ruined the surprise.”

Billy kicks at Silver’s leg under the table, what was likely meant to be a tap leaving Silver’s shin aching. “Don’t pretend you’re above it all. Some of us care.” 

Billy had cared differently when Silver met him. In basic training and well on his way to a foreign country until he was dropped from the program. _A knee injury_ , he’d told Silver at the time, though he was well enough to work the odd construction job between his assignment at the tiny recruitment office he’d been stuck in for six months. 

Six months of answering questions about the war they expected him to fight in had been enough to turn him anti war, shuttled off to a different, smaller office used for printing peace signs on tee shirts and handwriting tacky signs.   

Silver doesn’t tell Billy that he’s part of _why_ he’s so above it all, and raises his drink instead.

 

 _ **B Side  
**_August 2019

 

 _I don't want to earn money._  
\- John Silver, Black Sails X

 

“I see the department reshuffling is going smoothly,” Silver says as they pass another person looking like they just found out their spouse was fucking their boss and also their dog was leaving them. At least this man isn't weeping; that moment in the mail room earlier had been awkward.

Singleton follows his gaze and watches with narrowed eyes as the gutted professor passes. To his (very minor) credit, he waits until they turn a corner before muttering sidelong to Silver, “It's been like this all week. You ask me, they should be thankful.”

“Oh?” inquires Silver, tone inviting.

“Yeah. Their major is getting folded into Communications – it's not exactly the end of the world. You know some universities are doing away with Literature altogether?”

Singleton is an Administrative Goon on loan from the Bursars for the duration of the reorganization. He does a decent job of sounding neutral about the changes being made, but like all henchmen he leaps to complain at the slightest encouragement from a conversational partner.

Silver is _very_ good at encouragement.

(But God, he loves whiners. The quickest route to learning the lay of the land is through the discontented and professionally frustrated. Trust him – he's writing a dissertation on it. Theoretically.)

They reach the fourth floor and turn down a long cramped hallway. Two doors past an out-of-order elevator and Singleton stops next to an open door.

“This is your room,” Singleton says. “You're sharing it with a few others.” He glances at Silver, narrow-eyed again, as if expecting _him_ to complain. But that's not how this relationship works.

Silver flashes a smile and edges past him into the room. “Many thanks.”

Singleton leans back from the door frame, like a career in academia might be contractable by air. But he doesn’t leave, just darts furtive glances past Silver's shoulder.

“Thank you, Mr. Singleton – I'll be sure to get that paperwork to you asap.” Silver says.

“Mike,” Singleton reminds him, suddenly hesitant.

Silver smiles. “Right, Mike. Thanks.”

Singleton nods and finally departs. Silver turns and meets the eyes of the other TA sitting inside the office, a man as tall as his face is boyish. His desk is already covered in books and notes, even though Silver's pretty sure this is the first week the building's been made available to them.

The man takes the pen out of his mouth and points it at the door. His voice is quiet but very intense when he says, “ _Fuck_ that guy.”

Which is how Silver meets Billy.

* * *

“The stipend is nowhere close to adequate, of course,” Madi had said to him before leaving for her postdoc. “But they're covering tuition and willing to take you on at short notice.”

They were having drinks at the time, if he recalls right. Those last couple of weeks before she left, they'd met up for drinks a lot, as if they could bank a semester's worth of codependency for the lean months ahead. (It's possible he was the only one thinking of it like that.)

“I'm sensing a catch,” he said, as if the entire idea of a postgraduate career wasn't definitionally a catch: an apple sitting under a box held up by a stick and string; a niblet of Stilton balanced on a mousetrap.

“Do you remember six years ago, the professor I met at that Postcolonial Perspectives conference in Rio? I'm sure I told you about him.”

Silver paused; usually they don't talk about six years ago. Madi pretended it was for both their sakes, and he let her, but really she was just being kind – or, hell, maybe it _was_ for both their sakes; he was probably embarrassing to know back then. The whole period was a little vague in his memory, a morass of numbness soundtracked by Mount Eerie albums on repeat.

“I remember you telling me about some mad arrogant wanker who got you both thrown out of a pub.” He looked at her expression. “You don't – _no_.”

Madi primly sipped her martini.

“Please tell me you're joking.”

“He's actually quite brilliant,” she said, as if the man's intellect was the most pertinent issue at hand here. “I feel a little bad for calling him an imperialist back then – I was young and he had an English accent. There was no possibility things weren't going to take a turn for the adversarial.”

Madi thought England's main exports were Churchill quotes and overconfident white people. And to be fair, Silver thinks in her field that's almost certainly the case.

“He's an apologist, really, at worst,” Madi finished.

Six years ago she would have been galled by such leniency, he reflected. Then he threw his hands up over the table. “No, but wait – wasn't he a Lit professor or something?”

And _then_ , Madi hesitated. She avoided his eyes and reached again for her martini. For someone usually so straightforward, this was an indication of misgiving of apocalyptic proportions.

“What?” he pressed, with mounting dread. “Oh, god, _what_?”

“That's the other thing. About the situation.”

He leaned forward over his pint. “Madi, what class am I TAing for?”

* * *

“So do you actually belong to the Communications school, or are you one of the refugees?” Silver asks as he dumps his bag on a desk in the corner, the only other one with a view out the small window that overlooked a parking lot.

They have an additional three officemates, judging by the number of desks. At least – Silver hopes it's only three. Doubling up on desks is the worst; graduate students can be vicious about their workspace.

“Public relations,” Billy says cautiously.

“Ah. I take it you're assisting with actual Comms courses, then.” Silver slumps down into his chair and blinks bleakly over at the other man. “They've got me handling a Humanities class. Some freshman survey course.”

Billy pauses and checks, “Which professor?”

“Flint.” Billy grimaces in sympathy and Silver says, “Ah. You're familiar with him?”

“I was his TA last spring. And my mentor's head of the department, so I've known him for a few years.” He sits back in his seat and tells Silver frankly, “He's a bastard. Hope you have thick skin. And don't expect to get any work done during office hours – the students will form a line down the hallway like you're the hottest band in town.”

And then he frowned, clearly realizing what this meant for him as Silver's officemate.

Silver only nods. “Perfect. That's just – yeah. Great.”

He unpacks his bag – a book, notebook, and the packet of forms he told Singleton he'd return to him before the end of the day. Nothing compared to Billy's haul. Certainly nothing to distract him from the overwhelming crush of impending doom. He can practically feel the chemical balance of his stomach lining begin to churn and change, readying itself to cultivate some ulcers.

And so the school year begins, he thinks.

* * *

“Have you actually met this so-called monster yet?” Max asks him that evening in the bar below their apartment.

“Officially, we have a meeting tomorrow. Unofficially, I tried swinging past his office three times today and he was nowhere to be seen.” Silver lowers his pint and frowns thoughtfully. “He's either incredibly complacent about leaving his door open while he's away or he possesses a sixth sense for when someone is about to come in.”

“Maybe he was hiding under his desk,” she says. She pours an easy stream of rail tequila into a line of medicine cup shots without spilling a drop. It's oddly mesmerizing.

Silver cocks his head, considering. “One of the other TAs did tell me rumor was, last year Flint used to live out of his office for weeks at a time.”

Before Max can make a dispassionate but pointed comment about the cost of rent, which Silver may or may not currently owe her, someone breaks a bottle at the other end of the bar. They hightail it out of the place, presumably to hide their shame.

Max drops the tequila shots off in front of the woman three stools down and goes to clean the mess up, leaving Silver to contemplate the current texture of his life.

The bar, named The Street, is a shitty joint that sits on the border between the university and the blue collar neighborhood that is five years away from curdling into gentrified. Max has lived at the apartment two years already and bartends every night she isn't in night classes at the local community college. After John moved in four months ago, the bar was almost guaranteed to become their sad socializing patio, and it has.

She is wearing a quizzical expression when she returns to his end of the bar. “Three universities in five years. How do you get them to take you, let alone give you a paid position?”

He never should have admitted that to her. People are more impressed when they don't know... literally anything about him.

“Excellent student evaluations and coursework,” he says promptly, waving a hand. He smiles. “Also I'm very good at controlling the narrative. Comes with the territory. Sometimes I don't think they even _believe_ me, they just respect the spin.”

But Max isn't really listening anymore. She is deliberately not looking at the man who has just set up at the bar six stools down; he has his hands flat on the counter and is staring at her intently.

“Do you know that stocky fellow?” Silver inquires.

Max gives him a look. Probably for the stocky comment, because – fine, calling this man stocky is a bit like calling a cement wall _stiff_ ; he's not wrong, but he's also not hitting the most pertinent details here.

“If I needed you to fight him, could you?” she asks.

“What, like pretend to be your bouncer?” He glances at the man again, who looks narrowly back. Silver suppresses a wince, probably unsuccessfully. “I would – certainly help create a diversion while you escape out the back?”

It shouldn't be news to her that Silver is a coward, but she still throws him a filthy look before going down to have a seething muttered exchange with the man. Silver watches closely, one hand creeping to the phone in his pocket in case he needs to call the police, but the conversation doesn't seem to escalate. The man leaves looking more stymied than angry.

Silver takes his hand away and returns it to his pint as if he'd never been concerned in the slightest. It's a well-practiced move by now.

* * *

 The man in the headshot on the faculty website wore a quiet smile and a nice wool sweater that made his hair look more brown than auburn. He probably told casually scathing jokes about Hemingway and Mailer, or whoever Lit students read these days. He would inspire crushes in the most self-serious of students, the kind who would never think to add a chili pepper to an online professor rating but would bond over their infatuation with another devotee at 2 am in the library lobby when they’re both punch-drunk from mental exhaustion.

The man in the unmarked office on the fourth floor of the School of Public Communications wears a wrinkled white button-down and a close-cropped beard that is very, very red. He has a Waterstones' worth of books piled around the room – including on top both chairs in front of the desk, which Silver doesn't think is an oversight – and an expression on his face that plainly tells a person he'd rather be reading those books than talking to you – at this moment, at any moment.

He hasn't said anything beyond confirming Silver's identity.

“Do you actually have time to crack any of these, or is this more of a 'pharaoh being buried with his riches' type situation?” asks Silver.

It's possible the man's stare unnerves him a little. Silver's first impulse when he is uncomfortable has always been to talk, despite a lifetime of evidence that it only leads him deeper into trouble.

“You're not a literature student,” is Flint's eventual response. His tone suggests he doubts his ability to read.

“No,” he agrees.

He thinks: if the man asks me where I went to school, I am going to walk out. Silver can always find another place to survive.

Thus bolstered, he looks around the office again and gives a mental shrug; he leans over and shifts the lighter stack of books off one of the chairs. But they number too many to add to the pile on the other chair. He hesitates, momentarily thwarted, before giving up and settling the pile back in his lap as he takes the seat.

Flint's expression doesn't so much as twitch during this process. Silver entertains the possibility the man can't even _see_ the books anymore, and that's why he's still a visiting assistant professor at the age of forty-whatever.

“Right,” Flint says abruptly, leaning backward in his seat to pull open a drawer. He fishes around its contents for a while before pulling out a sheet of paper, which he pushes across to Silver.

He looks down at it; it's the syllabus for the course. It looks like the grandchild of a photocopy of a photocopy.

“You want this updated?” he asks.

“I want you to get 150 copies made.”

Silver looks at it again. “The date on this is from four semesters ago.”

Flint's hand disappears once more into the drawer. A few seconds later a small bottle of White-Out spins across the desk at Silver, who doesn't speak, just pockets the bottle.

“Now,” Flint says, as if they've just accomplished a major agenda item, “are you familiar with Homer?”

“Like the Simpsons?” Silver says, just to be a dick.

But Flint doesn't react to this either. It's like he doesn't hear him; Silver might as well be a mannequin, an effigy of a graduate assistant.

Flint continues, “I like to set the tone for my courses early on – weed out the weaker students.”

“The weaker students.” Silver is starting to lose his temper, which is a little surprising. Usually he's better at this.

“They'll be assigned a paper due the first Friday, so you should be prepared to handle questions about that.”

Silver shuts his mouth before he can parrot anything back. Unfortunately, this is one moment where Flint seems to expect a response; he raises his eyebrows at Silver. Silver, still off-balance by his own anger, merely raises his right back.

It's becoming clear to him: Flint does not care even a little about this course. You don't spend as much time as Silver has in academic circles before you learn to recognize types. Flint is going to be a tyrant in the classroom, the kind who sees every second spent with students as one stolen from his real work. There is nothing for Silver to do but keep a low profile and persevere through to the end of the semester.

“Well?” says Flint, impatience creeping into his voice.

Silver plasters on his most obnoxiously charming smile. “Sounds good. I look forward to working with you.”

For a second, Flint seems almost surprised; he narrows his eyes and studies Silver again, and then, in the most disconcerting turn of the entire meeting – he grins back.


End file.
